Curtis Hanson
Something happens about ten minutes into Curtis Hanson’s films. It’s a realisation that this guy really knows how to make films. “Well, that’s a good thought. But, why are you so surprised each time?” he says down the line from his home in Los Angeles. When the explanation comes that there is an element in his films which make them not generic, despite the fact that he generally uses the same movie-stars we are use to seeing in other people’s films, he is pleased. He has achieved his aim as a film-maker.
As a film-maker, he began in the late seventies writing screenplays. Probably the most important schooling he could have received was in 1982 when he worked on a screenplay for the adaptation of White Dog with the great Samuel Fuller.
“It was one of those incredibly fortuitous things that the odds are a million to one of it happening,” he says about the opportunity to work with Fuller. “I wrote an adaptation of this novelette called White Dog, and it sat on the shelf for, I don’t know, five or six years. At the time I was writing it, I actually talked to Sam Fuller about it because he knew the author and I knew Sam and was both a friend and an admirer of his. Then, five or six years later they hired Sam to direct the picture and they hired me to write a new script with him. So I found myself sitting up in Sam’s office working almost side by side. He had an office that was a converted garage and we worked, literally, into the wee hours of the night. Sam smoking his cigars, and he got me smokin’ a few too, and we wrote a whole new script. It was just a tremendous experience.”
Fuller’s films bare a similarity to Curtis Hanson’s films. There is strength in character and true emotion. Compare the social menace in Pick Up on South Street with that in LA Confidential, or the feeling of out-of-control madness in Shock Corridor with Bad Influence. It’s all there. It’s rare to see film-makers capture this essence of reality and truth. Hanson says it all comes from the characters. We know these characters and can identify with them by the end of the two hours. The characters, on the other hand, all come from his attention to detail.
“I’m a very detail oriented person,” he says, carefully choosing his words before speaking them, eager to not answer too hastily. “And movies in general, more than almost anything, in fact, are made up of very important details. If I came over to your house and I didn’t know you but I was just getting an impression about you from looking around your bedroom and looking around your living room, it’s the details that would give me a picture. In making a movie it’s much the same way. You don’t have much time to spend with these characters and you want the audience, whether they consciously think about it or not, you want them to get a feel for the characters. Of course, I try in my selection of material that I work on and the characters that inhabit that material, I try to find things that speak to me in a very personal way as well.”
There is something absent in Wonder Boys which has been present in Hanson’s other films. This element of menace which had audiences clutching empty popcorn containers in lieu of security blankets throughout LA Confidential, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Bad Influence. The malice in Wonder Boys, if it exists at all, is not an external threat, but purely a result of internal demons. It appears to be a more personal film. “I wouldn’t say it’s more personal than LA Confidential,” says Hanson, trying to assess the comparison. “Being a story of melodrama, that maybe disguises the personal aspect of it. That was the picture where I felt I had the opportunity, from start to finish, to make the picture that I wanted to, about what I wanted it to be about, and cast it the way I anted it to be. I had always dreamed of making a picture that would deal with my favourite theme, which is the difference between illusion and reality, and deal with it in the city of illusion: Los Angeles. I didn’t want to particularly make a story about policemen, and the fact that Grady Tripp is a novelist is not more important, or less important to me than that Bud White, Ed Ecksley and Jack Vincens were policemen. It just happens to be what they do, but they’re all struggling with life and struggling with their own idea of who they are and who they should be.”
Curtis Hanson has become somewhat synonymous with surprise casting. Ever since he cast Rob Lowe as an evil sadistic yuppie, at the time very much against type, there has been some interest in his choices. Casting Merryl Streep in an action role was another surprise, as was casting two actors who were virtually unknown outside of Australia as the backbone of a film featuring LA cops in the early fifties. The surprise in Wonder Boys is Michael Douglas. It seems that since his impressive performance in Wall Street he has not really been trying, rather, there was a sense of him just going through the motions. In Wonder Boys he is acting again.
“First of all,” says Hanson I should say Michael, himself, gets a large amount of credit for that, because Michael wanted to do that. When I read [the script] I was very interested, but the one question in my mind was Michael. So I wanted to sit down with him and find out if he was prepared to really go all out in playing Grady Tripp. I felt it needed to be approached with a complete absence of what one thinks of as ‘movie-star vanity’. He was not only prepared to go for it, but that’s why he wanted to work with me.”
“When I was first sent the script of Bad Influence,” he continues, “Rob [Lowe] was already attached to it, but he was supposed to play the other part. When I read it I said I’d be interested, but only if Rob would switch and play the bad guy. To me, I always try to cast, both as a film-maker and also as a member of the audience. I think about who would I like to see in the part. Who would have the capacity to, not only be good in the part, but also surprise me.”
By Josh Kinal
